The U.S. public has a “dysfunctional” relationship with science, author Chris Mooney recently told a Baker Institute audience, urging scientists to engage in a “new project of public outreach” to deal with it.
Mooney, a 2009-2010 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the author of “Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.” He also blogs for Discover magazine.
The relationship between scientists and the U.S. government hit its nadir under the George W. Bush administration, when “scientific knowledge itself” fell under attack, Money contends. He cited conflicts over such issues as global warming, stem cell research, evolution, endangered species protection and reproductive health.
With the election of Barack Obama, Mooney said, “the reality-based community has been restored in Washington.” However, he cautioned against complacency. “There’s a really long way to go if we think about how science is regarded in the nation as a whole.” When many Americans think about recent science stories, Mooney said, they recall that Pluto was demoted from the realm of the planets and fear the Large Hadron Collider threatens to “suck us into a black hole.”
But he was quick to add that simple ignorance of scientific learning is only a part of the problem. “I don’t think factual knowledge in and of itself is the biggest concern,” he said. “People also aren’t engaged with science. They’re not paying a lot of attention to it; they’re not seeing how it affects them.”
The polarized political scene in Washington and around the country has exacerbated the disconnect, Mooney said. It has opened up a gulf between where scientists and the public stand on several issues of importance.
While Mooney trained much of his fire on the right, he also singled out fears among some on the left of children’s vaccinations and their purported links to autism. People’s political views, he said, sometimes push them toward a particular position that is at odds with scientific evidence, and they find legitimacy for that position on the Internet. “It’s not necessarily stupidity as much as it is having a political outlook, going and finding information that then supports the political outlook,” he said.
Scientific knowledge is not just under attack from the fringes of society, Mooney said. It also faces direct challenges from some of the most powerful institutions in the United States, including politicians, the media and religious leaders.
In the past, educators and science journalists served as gatekeepers for legitimate scientific information, but those models no longer work, Mooney said. Rather than resorting to blaming their antagonists — what Mooney called the “you’re an idiot” model — he suggested scientists adapt to the current reality and learn modern communications skills.
Citing the example of the recent scandal surrounding the e-mail exchanges between climate scientists stolen from the University of East Anglia, Mooney said, “One reason that scientists need to become better communicators is to be able to head off a smear campaign against them.”
Beyond teaching scientists to communicate better with the general public, Mooney called for greater employment opportunities for scientists. There is only a 7 percent probability that a Ph.D. recipient under 35 will obtain a tenure-track position, he said. It’s a problem that could be remedied with a wider range of nonprofit, public-interest fellowships and jobs. Scientists should also learn more diverse skills to navigate the challenging the job market. And scientists must come up with new ways to connect their work with other sectors of society, including the realms of politics, media and entertainment, and religion.
View a webcast of Mooney’s Feb. 5 talk, “Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.”